Chapter 78
Over the next few months, I put my head down, went to work, and wrote my novels.
But that summer, the president deployed thousands of national guards into our streets.
They prowled the city in packs, they hid behind masks, behind green camouflage, inside anonymous black vehicles, hurling middle school lunchroom barbs at those who heckled them, terrorizing people then turning their terror into a low-budget movie trailer.
There was a checkpoint with officers making traffic stops on U Street near the restaurant.
I had many dark and elaborate dreams that August. In them I screamed, “Get the fuck out of my city!” until the blood from my tired lungs drowned me from the inside out, until the spit from my bloodied mouth blinded every fascist intruder fucking up my town.
I screamed, “Squabble up,” and they scrambled like ants.
But these were just dreams. I mostly stayed in the house on the days I wasn’t working, watching my city get stolen, my hope trampled, immobilized by my helplessness to stop it.
Every now and then, I searched news articles about the West Bank, irrationally, for Anwar’s name.
His family’s website hadn’t changed, but that meant nothing.
More and more of the region was being wrecked by war.
There was a man-made famine in Gaza that failed to be declared until it was too late.
I wouldn’t allow myself to imagine the worst even though we were already experiencing the worst. Instead, I reread the last email Anwar sent, now over three months ago: a video of a dance troupe with the subject line “I wish I could dance like this.”
I remembered he told me he was doing a summer program at his university. I had work in a few hours, but I decided to call the school to see if they could help me find out what happened to him.
I dialed the number on WhatsApp. It made a strange ringing sound that reminded me of an alarm. A man with a gravelly voice answered in Arabic then switched to English.
“Who’s this?” he asked.
“My name is Cat St. Clair. I’m trying to reach one of your graduate students, Anwar Shaheen? He’s in your engineering program.”
There was a long pause. “Cat like ‘meow’?”
I conceded, “Yes, Cat like ‘meow.’ ”
“Okay, one minute, please.”
I assumed he was searching to see if they had a student by that name, but, ten minutes later, a young man answered the phone in Arabic.
“Hi, is this… is this Anwar?”
He said in English, “Yes, hi? I’m told someone’s looking for me?” His voice sounded different than I expected. It was rugged, like something was stuck in his throat.
“It’s Cat.”
“Oh, hi, hi.” He laughed. “Your voice is deeper than I imagined. Why are you calling me here? It’s not bad. I’m surprised.”
“Oh, just… I haven’t heard from you.”
He pulled in a breath. “Oh, right! I’m sorry. I was with my grandparents this summer, the internet is really bad, but then when I returned my email had been hacked! With all that, I forgot to message you. You were worried about me?”
“Uh, yeah.” I laughed.
His laugh slid over mine, a bit too loud. “Ah, ok. I’m fine. Sorry to worry you.”
There was a pause. I didn’t know why I was so nervous. I was the one who called him. The doorbell rang downstairs. I ignored it, assuming it was someone trying to sell me knives.
“How have you been otherwise?” I asked.
“Eh, just trying to make it through my schoolwork.”
“Yeah.”
“My class is starting now, actually,” he said.
“Oh, okay. Have fun!”
“Have fun? In class? That’s not happening.”
I laughed.
“What a crazy laugh,” he said. “Okay, well, you have WhatsApp now? Add me. We can talk later. I can tell you everything about being hacked.”
“Before you go, can I ask you something?”
“Okay.”
“Why did you start emailing me?”
He didn’t hesitate. “I’m an open, social person. If we’re all going to die someday, why not know as many people as we can?”
He gave me his number, and I hung up, slightly dizzy.
The doorbell rang again. I scrambled to my bedroom window, slightly panicked. Who rang the doorbell anymore?
My eyes caught the curly top of someone’s head. Slowly rising from my crouch, I went downstairs, tousling my hair in the tiny entryway mirror. Pausing, I inhaled and opened the door.
Tristan was bent down, tying his shoes.
“Hi,” I said.
He looked up. A paper bag rustled on his wrist as he stood. “Hey.”
I twisted the doorknob just to touch something. It broke off in my hand. “Fuck, my dad’s gonna kill me.”
“Do you have a screwdriver?” he asked.
“I’m sure we do somewhere.”
He stood on the porch pretending to look at the neighbor’s sunflowers while I searched for one. I told him to come out of the heat. He followed me into the kitchen.
Eventually I found a screwdriver and handed it to him. I watched from the kitchen archway as he twirled the tool in his fingers. When he was done, he checked the knob. We stood awkwardly on opposite ends of the hallway until I said, “What’s in the bag?”
“Oh.” He’d left it on the table, so we went into the kitchen. His hand trembled when he reached inside, pulling out a chocolate cake from Bread Furst. “Happy birthday.”
I stared at him, blinking.
“It’s today, isn’t it?”
I reached for my phone on the counter. In small white font it said, “Saturday, August 16.”
“Oh. I forgot.” I added, “Thank you.”
He ran a hand over the back of his neck. “The cake was Jay’s idea, actually. He knows you love this one but the bakery didn’t deliver this far, so he asked if I’d bring it to you.”
I swallowed, almost too moved to speak. “I’m guessing you wouldn’t have come otherwise.”
“I don’t know. Maybe not.”
I rarely made coffee, but I was in the mood to make some then. The machine roiled as I reached into the cabinet for two mugs, setting them on the counter. I remembered he liked his black.
We sat at the table. “Cake for breakfast.” I beamed.
He smiled a little sadly.
“I didn’t know you and Jay were speaking again,” I said.
He brushed a finger along the cup handle. “Yeah, sometimes. It’s not the same though. How could it be?” But it sounded like he’d hoped it’d be.
I paused. “And Nia?”
“We went to lunch once. That’s it. She’s pretty done with me, understandably.”
I raised the mug to my lips. Before sipping, I said, “We were done with each other too, remember?”
He watched me like he was trying to figure out what to say. “I’m never really done with you.”
My hearing faltered like I was submerged underwater. But he didn’t give me a chance to respond. “Are you and Jay back together?”
“No.” I didn’t say anything about Jay’s new girlfriend. I hadn’t seen anything on his Instagram. Maybe it was a lie Milan had made up to hurt me. If it was, it worked.
He nodded, eyeing my pink utility jumpsuit. “What are you, a plumber now?”
I’d forgotten I had it on. “I work at a makeup store. It’s like their shtick.”
He gave me a strange look, then laughed. “So whatever happened to you after the lock-in? Did you get arrested too?”
“Yeah.”
“I was so scared.”
This kicked up all those tender feelings I’d had for him, an old mat being shaken, blowing up clouds of dust. I still had nightmares about being in jail too. After a long time he said, “Not that we changed that much.”
“Is change something you can see when it’s happening? Or only after?” I didn’t know myself.
“I’m not sure.” He grazed his coffee mug handle. “You know, the arrest didn’t show up on my record. I think Nia’s dad pulled some strings.”
“Her dad?”
Looking at me, “The police chief.”
I recalled the murmurings at the time of my release. “I had no idea.”
“Yeah, she wanted to keep it that way.”
“I wonder why she’d call him.”
“She doesn’t hate us, you know.”
“She just never wants to see us again.”
His laugh sounded strained. “Yeah, exactly. Her dad’ll pay a price for siding with protestors though.
Especially now that T*ump’s taken over MPD.
Oh, did you see the Sandwich Guy mural?” This was the guy who got arrested for throwing a foot-long sub at a federal agent.
Tristan showed the mural, and I laughed, delighted.
Tristan pushed the cake toward me. “This shit was thirty-two dollars in case you were wondering.”
I smiled. “What? No candles?”
He reached into his pocket and pulled out the most beautiful candles.
Long and slender, a rose-gold color you might find in a moneyed church, too regal for this tiny falling-apart kitchen.
He lit them with a lighter. It took me a while to blow them out.
He joked about needing to get my lungs checked.
Then we stared at the cake, avoiding each other’s eyes.
Tendrils of smoke curled slow and white from the candles’ tips, our faces obscured by a thin, swirling veil.
“I thought about what I’d say when I saw you again.” I met his eyes, crossing my legs, nervous. “But now, now I don’t know.”
“We don’t have to say anything,” he said. “We can just eat.”
I found us forks. We didn’t cut the cake, just ate it whole. It was fluffy and rich, a sweet antidote to the coffee’s bitterness. Tristan got a dab of frosting on his chin. I reached across the table and thumbed it away.
My phone rang. It was Jay. Seeing my face, Tristan said, “It’s all right. Answer it.”
At first I put the phone to my ear.
“Hello?”
“Happy birthday.” Jay’s voice was raspy with sleep.
“Thank you. Thank you for the cake too. I… I love it.”
“Ah, so the delivery man made it.”
I put the phone on speaker.
Tristan said, “Milkman, you owe me sixteen bucks. Plus tax for sending me into the big cat’s den.”
“That’s all? I’ll send you eighteen if you ask nicely.”
“What’s with the milkman thing?” I asked. “I never got it.”
Tristan said, “When we were in fifth grade…”—leaning into the phone—“Was it fifth grade?”
“Sixth.”
“In sixth grade—remember those little cartons of milk they had at lunchtime? They had those here, right? Well, Jay had like a chocolate milk trafficking ring—”
“This is an exaggeration, but go on.”
“It is not an exaggeration. Basically if you had chocolate milk, it went to Jay or you were in big trouble. One day, his stomach had had enough and he threw up in the middle of the cafeteria.” Tristan pantomimed it for me. “Like a horror movie exorcism.”
Jay said, “Thus, the nickname Milkman.”
I said, “I thought you were lactose intolerant this whole time.”
“Well, I am now.”
We all laughed, and then the laughter petered out.
Jay said he was going to go back to sleep since it was only eight there.
I told him I loved him, a habit, a truth.
He said it back like we’d never stopped, and maybe we hadn’t.
When we hung up, Tristan said he’d better go too.
My heart plummeted from its high. But I simply thanked him and walked him to the door.
“We should do this again,” I said.
“What? Eat cake at eleven in the morning?”
“Yeah, the whole thing.”
We hugged on the porch. He smelled as he always did, like rain, moss.
I only needed to get through ten seconds of his touch without crying, but I couldn’t make it.
The generosity of this morning swooped down like a sudden gust of wind.
I couldn’t stand against its power, forced into a bow. It felt unearned.
He pulled away, cradling the back of my head like it might tip backward. “What’s wrong?”
I shook my head.
“We’ll do it again, okay?”
I nodded.
He bounded down the steps toward his beat-up car. That little boy in the picture gripping the monkey bars with all his small strength. How could I have known? My mom once told me that there are questions in our lives that never get answered. I didn’t understand it then. But I understood it now.
That night, feeling alone in the final hours of my birthday, I carefully copied the novel about my parents and the longer, messier one about Amira into the same document, Frankensteining it into something senseless, ugly.
For weeks, I told the story to myself out loud while I showered, as I fell asleep, on the bus to work, until I didn’t need words to know it. Then one evening, I opened a blank document and rewrote everything from memory.
Perched on the edge of my bed, I read through it. The story ran toward me, bowlegged, a buoyant toddler learning what feet can do. I’d written an entirely new book.
I cried hard, sucking in breath like oxygen was scarce and I was stockpiling it for later.
Not just because of all the bad things that had happened, but because I was moving away from the story in my mind and toward the one in my body.
But folded inside these sobs was a loss so total it seemed only right that it’d rounded out a year piled up with losses.
Story didn’t solve anything. It only offered the sensation of resolution.
I sat staring down the barrel of more questions, at blank page after blank page at the bottom of this great document.
The Post-it note with “FORM” scrawled urgently on its surface had frayed and torn on my nightstand just like the idea of it had in my head.
I laughed, tired.
But staring at it the following day, I realized its meaning had been twisted up inside me: “Form” was also a verb, to build, to bring together.
Maybe what I was after was the moment before “form,” the noun, arrived, the bits the container couldn’t contain, that stretch of land where human wants look strikingly similar before lines get drawn around them.
How the wind sometimes sounds just like the ocean.
How one place can be all places if you listen closely enough.